Cisco's big bet
 
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A fresh batch of Cisco IP telephony products has some observers saying Cisco has "arrived" as a big-enterprise phone system vendor, while others still complain that the company's voice-over-IP vision remains fuzzy and too dependent on proprietary technology.
"What this indicates is a maturing of Cisco's [voice-over-IP] product line," says David Passmore, research director for The Burton Group. "Arguably, the early adopter-only state for these products is over."
The 12 new hardware and software products announced last week could help Cisco IP telephony customers make enterprise voice-over-IP applications more stable, secure and compatible with legacy telephone equipment and network protocols. Cisco has also added Enhanced 911 (E911) capabilities that make it easier for firefighters and police officers to respond to a call from a Cisco IP telephone.
On the hardware front, Cisco introduced survivable remote site telephony (SRST) support for Cisco 7200 series routers. This could let a large enterprise branch office or regional campus connected to a remotely located Cisco CallManager IP PBX server continue phone service if a WAN lifeline to a CallManager goes down, Cisco says. SRST was introduced in April in the Cisco Catalyst 4224 Access Gateway Switch for small and midsize branch offices.
Cisco also introduced its Emergency Responder - E911 Service software, which can track where an IP phone is located when a call is made and push that information to an emergency operator.
The product blitz brings the number of new enterprise IP telephony products and upgrades introduced by Cisco this year to more than 20.
This summer, the vendor also announced its largest voice-over-IP customer win: Dow Chemical's 50,000-seat order. This momentum has helped Cisco come on strong in the U.S. IP telephony market, as Cisco passed 3Com as the market leader last year.
It has since stretched its market share to 60% of IP PBX line shipments, according to Phillips Infotech.
However, some Cisco watchers remain critical of the paths the company has taken in developing its voice-over-IP strategy, citing the lack of a clear policy on the right voice-over-IP protocol to use. Other say Cisco mixes too much of its proprietary technology for some critical voice-over-IP features and controls.
"Cisco's IP telephony equipment, right now, is as good as any PBX system from an Avaya or Nortel," says Tim Kraskey, managing director Yankeetek, a Cambridge, Mass., venture incubator.
The problem, he says, is that "Cisco doesn't have a strategy that allows their enterprise and carrier networks groups to have one seamless set of baseline technology to let their IP voice systems work together."
Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is the future of voice-over-IP technology, Kraskey says, because of its interoperable nature and slick integration with messaging and multimedia applications.
"[Cisco] has to say that SIP is the protocol to use for all call control. End of story. Not H.323 or Skinny," he adds.
Cisco CallManagers support the widely used H.323 protocol, but not SIP, and come preconfigured with a proprietary Cisco call control protocol called the Skinny Client Control Protocol (SCCP, or "Skinny"). Cisco phones support H.323, Media Gateway Control Protocol (MGCP) and Skinny, but only a few models support those and SIP.
"We are evaluating SIP for the enterprise," says Hank Lambert, Cisco's marketing director for enterprise IP telephony. "We're seeing that there is just not a huge demand for it on the enterprise side."
Cisco's service provider voice-over-IP business is a different story. Cisco supports SIP on a variety of service provider products, such as the AS5400 access server, the 7960 IP telephone and SIP Proxy Servers for carriers.
Cisco officials from the service provider business have said that SIP will let its voice-over-IP gear run applications such as conferencing, voice mail and integrated voice, e-mail and Web services better than H.323, because SIP comes out of the Internet Engineering Task Force and resembles HTTP. H.323, Cisco says, is an ISDN videoconferencing protocol born out of the International Telecommunication Union that was retrofitted for voice over IP.
Another long-time Cisco watcher sees the use of proprietary technologies as potentially worrisome for users, but necessary for getting popular voice-over-IP products into users' hands.
"Cisco has legacy in proprietary technologies," says Frank Dzubeck, president of Communications Network Architects and a Network World columnist.
However, proprietary Cisco voice-over-IP technologies - such as Cisco products that can power IP phones over a network cable, or the use of the Cisco Discovery Protocol for its new E911 server - are sometimes necessary, Dzubeck says, to push the development of such technologies and to get products to market faster with the features users want.
Still, he adds "the mentality of someone buying IP products is 180 degrees away from [proprietary technology]." Dzubeck says that while Cisco voice-over-IP technology solves some issues that other vendors do not, "you have a lock-in situation . . . nobody wants to be 100% in the pocket of any one vendor."
One Cisco user sees the situation as less of an issue.
St. Paul, Minn., chemical manufacturer H.B. Fuller has used Cisco voice-over-IP products for the past several months. Kevin Wetzel, manager of global network services for the company, says he can wait for Cisco's IP telephony systems to become more standardized and interoperable, which he sees as an eventuality.
"That's one of the greatest benefits I can see in the future of IP telephony - moving toward open standards," he says.
Meanwhile, the new products are drawing praise from Wetzel, as well as other users and analysts.
"I believe SRST is what has really helped Cisco's [voice-over-IP] products mature as an enterprise telephony solution," Wetzel says. Since SRST was introduced in April, Fuller has been rolling out Cisco voice-over-IP products to 20 branch locations, all linking back to a centralized CallManager cluster in the headquarters via T-1 lines.
While Wetzel has deployed Cisco 2600s and Catalyst 4225s with SRST, he is interested in the support a Cisco 7200 with SRST could provide in some of the company's larger remote sites. Fuller estimates it can save $2 million during the next five years in system administration costs, long-distance charges and PBX upgrade costs by going with a centralized Cisco voice-over-IP system. The company has already saved $52,000 at one newly built site by wiring the building only for data.
Among the other products Cisco announced are:
With IP phone systems, it's the little things that can make the difference, The Burton Group's Passmore says, and Cisco's new products fill some of the nagging shortcomings users might have had with the products in the past. Passmore says products such as the 7914 expansion module, support for E911 and the ability to cheaply add analog phones are important to users.
"These are the kinds of things customers have asked for," he says. "Traditional PBX vendors have had a lot of these features for years."
Another user agrees.
"In the real world, there are advantages to go with IP, but there are also a lot little things like analog lines and fax machines that you just can't get rid of," says Steve Meyers, IT director for the city of Bend, Ore.
The city installed about 600 Cisco voice-over-IP phones in its police and fire departments at the beginning of the year, and plans to replace key telephone systems in all city buildings by year-end. Meyers says he could see savings in the $10,000 range if he can still use the large number of analog phones located throughout the city's municipal buildings.
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